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4. S W I T Z E R L A N D :
SIDE-BY-SIDE TRAINING - MILES APART - THROUGH "ELECTRONIC CLASS"
MISSIONARY STUDENTS HUNDREDS of miles apart will study together as a pioneering "electronic classroom" opens its doors this month.
A live broadcast link will connect students in Lausanne, Switzerland with others in Budapest, Hungary who are following the same leadership development course, in what is believed to be the first use of its kind of new communications technology for missionary training.
The two groups will share teachers as instructors speak from each site, able to interact with students at the remote location through a two-way video link.
The joint class is the first course under Project GENESIS - Global Electronic Networking Educating, Serving and Informing Students - being run by Youth With A Mission's University of the Nations, which plans to use the technology around the world to help spread the gospel into the 21st century.
During their 12 weeks of study, the Leadership Training School students will each follow three weeks of teaching from the "distant" classroom, with translation provided at their site
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As the system is refined, it will be spread to other UofN extension campuses around the world, helping train and equip YWAM workers in remote parts who previously may not have been able to receive the teaching they wanted.
"This can be a great tool in multiplying the number of workers for the Great Commission," said YWAM founder Loren Cunningham, who launched the project.. "We have teachers and instructors that are running their legs off, as they travel around the world and they can't even scratch the surface of our existing 210 locations.
"We are looking to have developed 1,000 UofN locations within the next few years, so the advantage of this kind of technology is clear."
The two-way link can be made fairly inexpensively, with just a video camera, computer, TV and digital phone line. A successful pilot project last November linked students live in Switzerland and Germany, with simultaneous translation into four languages.
"We are moving into the electronic century," said Cunningham, who added that the split-site classrooms would be well accepted by young students who have grown up with technological developments. "These days it is very normal for us to use the telephone - we just pick it up. It would have been rejected offhand as an impossible dream, in the last century."
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